Richard Wendell Sotka (Mississippi County, Arkansas Sheriff’s Dept.) and the home where he killed Rhonda Cegelski and Paula O’Connor (WBAY screenshot)
A 49-year-old man in Wisconsin will spend the rest of his life behind bars for killing his girlfriend and her best friend, stabbing them both to death when he “snapped” in a jealous rage because he saw them being intimate and felt “humiliated.”
Brown County Circuit Court Judge Beau Liegeois on Monday ordered Richard Wendell Sotka to serve the maximum penalty for all counts, including two consecutive life sentences without the chance for parole for the 2023 slayings of Rhonda Cegelski, 58, and Paula O’Connor, 53, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show. Sotka was dating Cegelski at the time of he killings.
A jury last month deliberated for only an hour before finding Sotka guilty on two counts of first-degree murder with a dangerous weapon, five counts of jumping bail, and one count of criminal damage to property. One of the murder charges also included a domestic abuse modifier.
In addition to prison, Sotka is also required to pay $16,000 in restitution.
Given the chance to speak on his own behalf, Sotka continued to maintain that the two women attacked him, saying he felt no remorse for killing them.
“I’ve listened to people call me a lunatic, insane, animal, and yet they are surprised when I acted out of fear, and confusion in a messed-up situation, the situation brought to me by another,” Sotka said, according to a report from Green Bay, Wisconsin CBS affiliate WFRV. “I didn’t pick the fight, I ended it.”
Liegeois did not hold back during the hearing, repeatedly castigating Sotka and his “classic domestic abuser talk” before handing down the two life sentences.
“This is somebody who was a daughter, a sister, a friend, a mother and a grandmother even, who you basically just wiped off the face of the earth because you felt a little bit insulted,” the judge reportedly said. “You’re like a predator in the wild, going for the neck. That’s the only way to really describe it. So when I consider everything in this case, I am going to sentence you to consecutive life sentences.”
In referring to the “brutality” of the killings, Liegeois said it was “hard to visualize something even more horrific than what happened in this,” per the Green Bay Press Gazette.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, police on Jan. 29, 2023, responded to the duplex Sotka and Cegelski shared after the latter’s daughter found the two victims dead inside and called 911. Both had been stabbed multiple times with an 8-inch blade recovered from the scene.
Authorities said both women had been stabbed multiple times in the face and neck. O’Conner’s body was closer to the front door of the duplex with a knife still stuck in her neck. Cegelski’s body was located in the kitchen.
After being identified as Cegelski’s live-in boyfriend, Sotka quickly became a person of interest in the women’s murders.
Sotka at the time was out on bond from an unrelated case in Oconto County, Ohio, where he was charged with stalking, harassment, and violating a restraining order and was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor. But Sotka cut the monitoring device from his leg and ditched it along Interstate 41, resulting in the criminal damage to property charge.
However, Sotka was driving a truck from his employer that was equipped with its own OnStar GPS tracker showing he was on the road in Arkansas.
Authorities in Arkansas apprehended Sotka about 10 hours after the victims’ bodies were discovered. He was carrying about $4,000 in cash and had his passport with him, authorities said.
In a criminal complaint, police said that after his arrest, Sotka confessed to the double murder, telling investigators that he felt “humiliated” after getting out of the shower and seeing the two women engaging in sexual activity after a night of heavy drinking. He also repeatedly denied the stalking charges he was facing in the unrelated case.
“He said he asked [Cegelski] where he was supposed to go and at that point he said he lost it, he just lost it. He said he couldn’t tell [police] details or tell [police] exactly what happened but he knows he completely lost it,” authorities wrote. “[Sotka] stated, ‘I’m guilty of killing these girls but I’m not guilty of what they said I did in Oconto County.”
Additionally, Sotka told authorities that he had also “snapped” on a different woman he was dating about 20 years prior to the murders, per the Gazette. In that case, he reportedly knocked out the victim’s teeth, broke her leg, and fractured her skull. The victim in that case also testified during Sotka’s murder trial.
Milwaukee Fox affiliate WITI reported that Sotka plans to appeal his conviction and sentence.
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